The Bourgeois and the Savage

A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith

Alfonso Maurizio Iacono author Leigh-Anne Wendy Mazzoncini translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Published:19th Mar '21

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The Bourgeois and the Savage cover

This classic text in Italian history of political philosophy, translated into English for the first time, investigates the philosophical and ideological conceptions hidden beneath the modern image of the isolated individual. In The Bourgeois and the Savage, Alfonso Maurizio Iacono reveals that this apparently simple and transparent image is imbued with a profound complexity containing human and social relationships, which are intertwined with relationships of power, domination, inequality, colonisation and servitude. As Karl Marx argued, and as was later confirmed by twentieth-century anthropology, the isolated individual does not stand at the beginning of history; he can emerge only where social relationships are already very developed and where society appears as a tool used for private purposes. Considering the writings of Daniel Defoe, the great French Enlightenment philosopher Turgot, and the father of political economy Adam Smith, The Bourgeois and the Savage critically analyses the process which led to the naturalisation of the image of the isolated man and traces its development and transformation into a still dominant paradigm.

ISBN: 9783030395100

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

147 pages

1st ed. 2020